


let my roots take flight

by BathosBardess



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: #voltronpidgebirthday, Before and After Kerberos, Character Study, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Hurt/Comfort, Missing Scenes, back story, pidge addressed as katie, she/her pronouns for pidge
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-07
Updated: 2017-05-07
Packaged: 2018-10-29 06:18:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,363
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10848204
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BathosBardess/pseuds/BathosBardess
Summary: “Katie, you'refourteen.”“Pidge Gunderson is seventeen. He has no family. He graduated with a 3.8 GPA. I'll be fine, Mom.”//Katie Holt never meant to be a problem child.





	let my roots take flight

**Author's Note:**

> this was supposed to go up as a 1k for Pidge's birthday but then it blew up to 3k so here we are.
> 
> Pidge isn't _Pidge_ yet, so she's addressing herself and is addressed as Katie, with she/her pronouns.
> 
> title from "Tiptoe" by imagine dragons

* * *

 

When Katherine Holt dropped out of school aged eleven, her parents agreed to homeschool her.

 _Katie has an extraordinary mind_ , her principal protested. _We apologise if this environment isn’t right for her, but --_

“Don’t think about what he said, Katie-Kate,” her father assured her on the drive home. “I mean, he’s right about your mind, but honestly?” He reached over to ruffle her hair, still too short for her liking. “I think they just want a child prodigy for their flyers.”

Katie felt an apology try to climb out of her throat.

(She had promised herself she would not apologise for things so trivial. 

Things like how her mother would now have to split work between the school and her to ensure she completed her education.)

“Dad?” she ventured. “I know homeschooling can be a big deal --”

“Katie.” Sam Holt’s tone was soft and firm, on the verge of a lecture but holding back. “I’m not sending you back to sit with those ankle-biters and their attitude. I will not have my daughter bullied.”

“Dad, I think I can handle myself.” 

For emphasis, she threw three rapid-fire punches at the air in front of her, her knuckles barely missing the dashboard.

Her father laughed. “I know you can whoop some major ass, sweetie,” he said, and she giggled at the profanity. “But your mom and I just. We honestly think school might be holding you back.”

(Katie Holt was eleven years old and had programmed every appliance in the house to greet each family member by name.) 

She couldn’t argue with that. 

-

 

She had honestly expected Matt to be indignant. 

“My baby sister’s too cool for school, huh?” he teased, bending down to flick at her nose, his face split in a grin. “So you gonna sit around at home all day?” 

“Matt, I don’t think that’s how homeschooling works.” 

“Hey, I wouldn’t know.” He stood up and put his hands behind his back, leaning away from her on his heels. “ _This_ cadet graduated fully robed, half-naked.” 

Katie grimaced. 

(Matt had worn only boxers under his graduation robes as a part of an elaborate senior-year-wide prank that...didn’t go over well with the school, honestly.) 

“I won’t just _sit around_ , Matt. I’ve got to get to the Garrison too!” 

“Obviously.” He smiled ear to ear, and pinched her cheek. “The Garrison’s tiniest scientist!” 

Katie smacked his hand away, but she didn’t stop laughing. 

-

 

Katie graduated high school in the winter before her fourteenth birthday. 

She could have held on longer, worked a little less harder; she told her mother, “This brain gets bored easy.” 

Colleen went back to working normal hours, and sometimes it was lonely at home alone, but Katie had Gunther and her computer and old television shows. 

She was too young for the Garrison, genius or not. 

Her hair grew out beautifully, and Katie refused to pin it up unless absolutely necessary. Her mother loved brushing it out every night, the same chestnut brown as her son’s, the same chestnut her husband’s had been. 

Some nights it would just be the two of them -- her father working overtime to get the Kerberos mission off the ground -- and her mother would sing to her while braiding. Colleen Holt had the soft, feathery voice of a choir boy. It made Katie think of meadows and wildflowers. 

-

 

She wore her best dress the day they launched the Kerberos mission. 

They didn’t allow her mother and her within three hundred feet of the site. 

They drove home in Sam’s car, her mother’s fingernails drumming a sharp tattoo on the wheel. 

They had watched the vessel until all they were looking at was clear noon sky, their mouths dry with pride and worry and Katie could swear she could feel her pulse behind her eyes and her heart felt like a million tonnes about to drop out of her ribcage, just like that, _plop,_ to the ground and still keep beating, a rhythm that spelled out _I’ll be up there someday, just you all wait_ \-- 

Katie was fourteen and small for her age, wrapped up in a dress that nearly fell to her ankles, her brain working, always working, debugging code behind glazed eyes that only barely took in the red desert outside, the sunset staining the furthest hillocks a burning purple. 

“Katie?” It was not a full question but it was, the end of her name lifted in the weary worry that came with motherhood. 

Katie grunted in reply, feigning fatigue while her body buzzed, and she missed the way her father called her _Katie-Kate_ in that same tone, a name her mother would never use because it was Sam-and-Katie’s and would stay Sam-and-Katie’s forever. 

(When Pidge looks at the Castle’s glass surfaces and whispers _Katie-Kate_ to herself, she can swear the click against her teeth tastes like home.) 

-

 

Katie was fourteen when she was awoken at an unholy hour to the stereo politely but loudly informing Colleen of an incoming call. 

There was the pressing silence that followed the announcement once the call was answered, a blessed silence that reminded Katie to de-program the damn thing in the morning. 

Then her mother was crashing down the stairs and yelling at the television to switch on the news. 

-

 

Curled nearly in half over banister, Katie Holt watched the words _Pilot Error_ mock them from where they unfurled under Sam and Matt’s official portraits, their smiles eager and proud and slightly bemused at how lucky they had gotten in life. 

Her mother was still --  too still, her shoulder blades high and unmoving, holding in her breath as she waited for an update, _any_ update- 

Katie grit her teeth and glared at the pixels making up Shirogane’s eyes, calm dark pools holding up a smile too soft for battle. 

She would have preferred it had been an ugly slash, like a razor cut, but there it sat, small and confident, taking up space even though her father’s beam lit up the screen and- 

They switched to the reporter again, a weasel-like man with darting eyes. 

Her mother breathed out a sob as the weasel man declared half her family dead. 

Katie chose not to believe him. 

-

 

Katie was a spring child, and the stories told her she ought to be wreathed in peonies and bluebells, elbows and knees stained green, lungs breathing pixie dust. 

The landscape outside her window was red and orange and yellow, the earth was desiccated, the only green was a faint line that formed when the sun was halfway up and halfway down. 

When her lungs breathed in flowers her throat would violently protest, and through watering eyes she would wonder if the only things flowers wanted with her was to wrap their thorny branches around her chest and _press_ , press deep. 

They could crawl in through holes in her sides and claw up her throat and explode out of her mouth, a mess of soft petals and baby leaves and thorns and ivy, luminous in the sunrise even through a delicate film of blood and spit. 

They liked to show you girls covered in petals, their buttery bodies aglow with the kisses of a thousand roses, milk and cream and peaches and honey in the soft light of the witching hour when the afternoon melted into twilight and even though it was the middle of the day everything felt a little less real. 

They liked to show you girls covered in petals and cream, their bodies soft and their smiles welcoming. 

Katie wondered if they’d like a girl even if the petals were spines on woody vines and the cream was blood and grime. 

-

 

The had an honour guard at the funeral. 

Katie watched the theatrics with her mind a hundred yards away -- inside the laptop on her car seat carefully, quickly scanning through every server the Galaxy Garrison had online. 

Katie imagined small, bony hands snatching up bundles of light and hugging them close to a small, bony chest, warm against ribs that stuck out too far when the arms were raised. 

They wrapped two flags over her outstretched hands, and she could feel her pulse against the fabric where they sat, insolent, over the inside of her small, bony wrists. 

Her tongue was a dead weight on her bottom row of teeth, pin-pricks of blood blooming. 

There were white lilies everywhere, and she blamed them for the itch in her throat, the electricity across her fingertips. 

Her neck felt bare and vulnerable under the complicated bun her mother had put her hair in, fixing it with pearl-top pins. 

She looked sallow in black but her chestnut hair twinkled like the stars at dawn, pulled together with trembling fingers, threaded through with Colleen’s pain. 

-

 

She opened her laptop to twenty years’ worth of Holts in the Garrison, but none of them were hers. 

They had pulled her brother’s assignments and her father’s presentations and Matt’s gradesheets and certificate of graduation and her father’s interfaculty messages and letters of recommendations- 

Samuel and Matthew Holt did not exist on the Garrison’s public servers. 

She cursed loudly and wetly, fury like a clot in her throat, and slammed both fists down on the keyboard. 

 _Syntax error_ , the computer informed her. 

“ _Syntax error_ ,” she mocked at the screen, at the underscore blinking in and out -- in and out -- of existence. 

“Katherine.” 

Her mother was a blur at the steering wheel, the afternoon sun a halo at her back, and _God_ , she was an angel and a warrior woman, her back straight even when her mouth was a shapeless line of grief. 

“Sorry,” she managed. 

“It’s okay, sweetheart,” Colleen soothed. “I understand.” 

 _You do?_  

Katie looked up at weary eyes and her own sad smile and let herself cry, palming at her tears until her hands were streaked with black smears and her stomach threw up bile in hiccups.

-

 

Sitting in the cold of the desert night, Katie set up an array of scanners and pointed them at Pluto. 

Every transmission ever sent left an echo. This, she knew. 

Spacecraft came with black boxes. Spacecraft were programmed to send distress signals. Spacecraft came with unique identification numbers. 

It amused her, that they had sent people to Pluto -- that there were people living on the Moon -- and yet their technology held ghosts of pathways they had used a hundred years ago. 

 _Echoes_ , she snorted. The chill in her bones made it easier to laugh, easier to give in to hysterics. 

Her computer beeped at every echo it processed, slower when they came in analogue. The dishes sat around her, and she wondered if, from above, they looked like a spider’s eyes. 

A set of beeps called out plaintively, and she checked their ages. 

Three came from an US government code, two of them further than Jupiter. 

All of them were SOSs. They were sent on autodrive by a ship running out of fuel, two weeks after the _pilot error_. 

Katie grinned - a dark, unpleasant grin, all teeth and nose and bitten lip. 

-

 

There were plans to build a memorial. 

Katie sneaked around while her mother talked, and then she got caught two firewalls inside Iverson’s computer, and the daughter of a martyr was suddenly a disgrace. 

 _We are sorry, Mrs Holt, but Katherine is not to step foot in Garrison grounds again. Yes, this applies to her admission as well. We are sorry, Mrs Holt, but we do not take kindly to disciplinary issues._  

Katie stood on shaking knees, trying not to fidget at the dark brown smear on the elbow that had knocked out a senior cadet’s tooth. 

“Katie,” her mother sighed. 

That was it; that was a whole sentence even though it wasn’t, two syllables hanging in the air conditioned air between them, creeping inky fingers under her chin, forcing her to look at her mother, _look_ at this woman who had stood with her spine upright while her son moved to the stars, her husband out of reach, watched with warm support as her daughter skipped identities like skipping stones, from prodigy to nuisance to criminal. 

“They’re lying, y’know,” Katie sobbed. Her ponytail was askew, and the weight pulled at her scalp. “They’re lying, about _everything_ \-- Mom, I’ve looked up everything, everything I could find, they could delete Dad and Matt, Mom, but they _couldn’t_ delete Shirogane, he was their best and that’s why they gave him that mission so early, Mom, and I’ve looked up everything and they couldn’t have crashed, Mom, they _couldn’t have_ \--” 

Colleen’s arms were around her, her cheek on her dusty hair, and she murmured something that sounded like _I know_ but Katie was too angry, too panicky, too much _everything_ , and she wriggled out of her mother’s grip and looked into her own two eyes on an older face and whispered, “I can’t stop now, Mom.” 

 _What have I got to lose?_  

Her mother cried, then, and they held each other in the quiet, and Katie felt the vines in her lungs close around her heart, and there were lilies around their family portrait. 

Matt’s clothes still hung in his closet, as if he had only left for the academy, as if his room was not a memorial. Her father’s toothbrush sat still in its cup in her parents’ bathroom. 

Gunther was an old dog with old habits, and even though the whining had stopped he still stayed off the bigger armchair. 

If Katie had believed in ghosts she would tell you that they were in the room with the two women right then, presences as solid as the still air would allow, amber eyes and bell-like laughter and a gentle admonishment and _Katie-Kate, you grow too quickly._  

A month ago, all Katie had wanted was to be at the Garrison, to touch machines and tune them to talk to the stars. 

Katie Holt had alchemy fingers, tapping and twisting and melding until metal worked like life. 

But metal was not life, because life was magic and Katie Holt didn’t want to believe in magic when she couldn’t summon it to bring them back. 

-

 

Katie had been, by her own intentions, many things in her life. 

Child, daughter, troublemaker. 

Prodigy, genius, hacker. 

Katie Holt had never meant to be a problem child. 

Colleen Holt had lost a quarter of her weight, as the bathroom floor announced cheerfully one morning. 

Katie took Matt’s first Garrison uniform -- the one without his patches, and a ketchup stain behind one knee -- and tossed it into the washing machine. 

Her mother pulled it out of the dryer. 

“Katie,” she snapped, walking into her bedroom, ignoring the satellite dish taking up half the floor. 

It’s not a complete sentence but it is, two syllables stretched tight, ready to break if she plucked them the wrong way. 

Katie swallowed. 

“Uh.” She swallowed again. “I’m going to...try to fix it up to fit me?” 

A scowl ghosted her mother’s face. “Katie, _why_?” 

“I’m joining, Mom. I start next month.” 

She held out a sheaf of papers held together with a bull-clip, the Galaxy Garrison’s logo adorning the watermark of the very first. 

Her mother mouthed the name, eyes widening at _Gender: Male_ , swallowing subtly at _Next of kin: N/A_. 

The photo was a gently manipulated portrait of Matt, only he had Katie’s eyes and nose and mouth. It was also conveniently blurry. Blame it on state budgets. 

Her arms started aching. 

“Katie.” Her mother gasped a sob. “Katie, you’re _fourteen_.” 

“Pidge Gunderson is seventeen. He has no family. He graduated with a 3.8 CGPA.” Katie cracked a reassuring smile. “I’ll be fine, Mom.” 

(It was startlingly easy, hacking into Arizona State’s records, inventing a ward of the state, giving him three middle schools and a high school and no known guardians. She even had report cards ready. 

She meant to give him a 4.0, but that would be preening. 

It would also attract attention. A 4.0 orphan would make an excellent charity case: a poster boy for the state-run universities. A 3.8 orphan could elicit an _ehh._  

He had slipped through into the Garrison’s gifted orphans program; the academy was obligated to fill the quota. 

She would feel bad about it if she didn’t feel half-orphaned and raw all the time.) 

-

 

When Katie shed her skin, she was reminded of rattlesnakes. 

She supposed other girls thought of caterpillars and butterflies, moulting till she got so big her own skin could not contain her. Then she would melt and emerge, the best version of herself, and people would gasp as she flitted around them, delicate and out-of-reach. 

Katie had spent the last ten years in this college town in the loamy red lap of the Mojave. She had not seen a butterfly outside of the television, on late night documentaries about the forests that had grown into ever-weeping clouds. 

She thought about the rattlesnake in their yard, tail quivering urgently as it streaked over the fence, leaving behind nothing but a translucent rope of scales -- a bare impression of what it was that had escaped the garden, no trace of sabre-like teeth, no droppings of venom. 

A solid ghost, she had mused. 

 _Look. Look at this. I was here. I was here, and you escaped my wrath. This is what you have to show for it._  

 _This was my skin, now it is not. This was me, and now it is not._  

 _There is a newer me that jumped this fence. The newer me has her fangs._  

-

 

Katie wrapped a stand of chestnut hair -- just wide enough -- around one fine-boned wrist, and waited. 

She wore Matt’s oldest uniform, her mother’s stitching running up the insides holding it closer to her skin. The shoulders fit uncomfortably well, she noticed. 

Her mother stood outside the bathroom door. 

(“Are you sure you don’t need me to--?” 

“Mom. I have to do this myself.”) 

Standing in cream and orange and gold, Katie searched for Matt in her features -- wide eyes, small nose, wide jaw. The hint of honey in searching brown eyes, the small smattering of freckles across both cheeks, the defiant curl of the fringe of her hair -- Katie trembled as phantom pain shot across her chest. 

 _Breathe in. Breathe out._  

She raised the scissors. 

-

 

Katie would have taken all her cut hair and pasted them back on if she could, if only to wipe the stiffness out of the corners of her mother’s mouth. 

She didn’t look at her daughter the entire drive to the nearest Greyhound station (“Mom, an orphan can’t show up in the _Holt family car._ ”). 

Katie could have sworn the shame and guilt and _where did I go wrong raising her_ was a tangible thing, pressing against the windshield and against their chests. 

Colleen rolled the car to an easy stop a hundred feet from the greying building. It was a relic of a diesel-laden past, the paint chipping; Katie wondered if it smelled like artificial cheese. 

“Mom--” 

“Katherine.” It was not an entire sentence; it was barely enough to hold an entire sentiment. Her mother said her name slowly, letting the R’s unfold over her tongue languidly. Katie wondered if Colleen wanted to savour the last time she could call her daughter that name. 

Matt’s round, brass-rimmed glasses fogged up, and Katie reached over to bury her face in her mother’s shoulder. 

Colleen’s heartbeat was loud, almost erratic; her lungs worked through tremors. She smoothed the stubborn cowlicks at her daughter’s nape, half wistful. 

Katie pulled away, pushed the door open. “I’m going to find them, Mom. I’m going to find them and bring them home and I won’t stop before I do.” 

Colleen couldn’t look at her. “You have enough cash?” she asked the steering wheel. 

“Yes, Mom.” 

Honey-brown eyes met their twins. “Well, go on. Go change the world.” 

“Yes, ma’am.” 

Katie clambered out, armed with nothing but one suitcase and her backpack and Matt’s glasses and her mother’s eyes and her father’s smile. 

A larger, more calloused hand caught hers. Her mother turned her fingers to grip Katie’s in a firm handshake. 

“Well, then.” Colleen smiled, scared and worried and proud. “Good luck, Pidge.”

 -

  
  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> brain: remember your issues with femininity and grief as a teenager  
> me: yeah why  
> brain: project them on this unsuspecting fictional character
> 
> -
> 
> the hardest part of this fic was wondering if "mum" is british and "mom" is american.
> 
> for clarity's sake:  
> \- colleen holt's name is canon. it's on the website.  
> \- colleen is a schoolteacher.  
> -by public servers i mean the site you log into using your student/faculty/employee ID.  
> -the mojave is literally the only north american desert i could think of without research.  
> \- pidge is an april kid with allergies. take this headcanon from my cold dead hands.
> 
> -
> 
> find me on tumblr at [bathosbardess](http://bathosbardess.tumblr.com) !


End file.
